Seas of Crisis (34 page)

Chapter 33

H
is Yak flight and the rendezvous completed, Jeffrey jogged along
Challenger
’s hull and down the ladder inside her weapons loading hatch. Bell stood there in the passageway to greet him, while crewmen hurried to inspect and tightly shut the hatch.

“Come on,”
Jeffrey said, lugging his overnight bag and heading for the control room.

Bell followed. “What’s happening, sir? I got a message about some sort of combined task force with Russian subs?”

“It’s gone all squirrelly, yeah. Get
Challenger
submerged and under the pack ice smartly. Before you ask, permission granted to go active on ice-avoidance sonar so we don’t crash into something. Make flank speed until we’re in acoustic-link range of
Carter.
” Thirty nautical miles for the U.S. system. “We need to warn Harley. A pair of Akula-Twos are rushing to join up with your ship, Captain Bell, so that together we can destroy the German sub that brought the commandos who launched the ICBMs. The same German sub which you and I know is
Carter.
”

“I expect Harley’s people detected them. We just need to elude the Akulas, which shouldn’t be too hard, and we’re home free.”

“It’s a hell of a lot more complicated. To cement the goodwill we’ve earned with the Kremlin, save the Russian president’s domestic political backside, and avoid Moscow megahawks having a good excuse to glass Berlin, we must be
seen
to work with the Akulas and actually
sink
that Amethyste. Sink it where its hulk can be found, as positive proof of German deceit and aggression toward the Russian people and government.”

They reached the control room. Finch, as junior officer of the deck—JOOD—confirmed via photonics mast that the brow from the icebreaker was clear. Bell began barking out orders to submerge the ship and get under way at flank speed. COB and Patel got busy at the ship control station. Finch went back to being sonar officer, and another lieutenant (j.g.) took his prior role as JOOD in the aisle next to Sessions, the XO.

Jeffrey zipped open his travel bag, yanking out the waterproof packet of data disks that Meredov’s aide Malinkova had prepared for him. He gave them to Bell. “Have someone get these to the Systems Administrator. I want them up and running yesterday. Maps of Russian minefields and hydrophone nets. And specs for the undersea covert acoustic link used by our new comrades-in-arms,
Wild Boar
and
Cheetah.
”

Bell gestured for the Messenger of the Watch; he grabbed the disks and headed below to the systems administrator’s cubicle.

“Who commands the combined task force, sir?”

“I do.”

“You’re double-hatted, Commodore,” Bell said with a lopsided smile. Assigned two different naval jobs at once.

“Lucky me. I’ve got two separate task forces, which secretly overlap in the form of
Carter
-as-Amethyste-Two, and my task forces are at war with each other. A war to the death, except if
Carter
is destroyed, the end effect will be that Russia joins the Axis.”

“Can we sink the Russian subs? If we need to?”

“Aside from the fact that losing one or both in action would badly sully the Russian president’s currently shaky position? And the other fact that Russian hydrophone grids are listening in, and a very smart man who’s now a vice admiral could reconstruct events and get, to put it mildly, very pissed off?”

“You mean Meredov?
Promoted?
”

Jeffrey nodded. “Akula-Twos have double steel hulls, with inner and outer so widely spaced apart that they’ve got the highest reserve buoyancy of any fast-attack in service anywhere. And the inner hull has eight separate watertight compartments, right? They’re nearly indestructible, unless we go nuclear.”

“Would we?”

“Our odds of surviving a two-on-one duel like that with nukes are nil.”

“But
Carter
 . . .”

“I know. She is absolutely, positively not expendable. Our orders say
we
are. If this thing goes tactical nuclear, with the big yields on Russian warheads, Harley needs to run, not help us, and I don’t see
Carter
surviving the whirlwind of shock waves and fireballs anyway. Do you?”

“No, sir.” Bell was abashed, and worried.

Challenger
’s deck nosed down slightly, and the ship gained speed. As she approached her maximum, fifty-three knots, she began to vibrate—as she always did when the propulsion plant put out so much power. Things in the control room shook, squeaking and bouncing gently on their shock-absorbing mounts; mike cords hung on the overhead jiggled. The ship was making a heavy surface wake by doing flank speed so shallow, but that was the least of Jeffrey’s concerns.

He tried to think ahead. Everyone in Control had heard what he’d told Bell, and they were tense. “I need two separate acoustic link setups. One for
Carter,
and one for the Akulas. Get your best Ru-ling in here to handle comms with the latter.” A Russian language expert. “I think your XO should continue to manage link messages with Captain Harley.” Sessions, sitting at the command console, nodded, with what for the mild-mannered Nebraskan was the grimmest expression that Jeffrey had ever seen.

“Understood, sir,” Bell said. He issued orders.

The senior chief, who was the best onboard Russian linguist, entered Control. “Use the console I was borrowing, Chief,” Jeffrey told him. “I’ll stand.” Technicians were already installing the software needed to be compatible with the Russians’ own frequency-agile, encrypted, digital undersea communications link. That link and the one used by
Challenger
and
Carter
had totally different formats and protocols, so neither could detect or interfere with the other. The Ru-ling reconfigured his keyboard to represent the Cyrillic alphabet.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Torelli said from by the weapons systems consoles, “we have the overlay of hostile minefields and hydrophones uploaded now.”

“Perfect.” Jeffrey walked over to look at them on a fire-control technician’s console.

“I sure hope Russian spies haven’t stolen the specs to be able to detect and listen in on
our
comms link,” Bell said. “And that Germans didn’t nab the specs and hand them over to Russia.”

Jeffrey remembered the mole, still on the loose somewhere in America’s submarine warfighting personnel structure.

“Concur in the extreme. . . . And I better make damn sure I don’t mix up which link is which, and send the Russians a message I mean for Harley. Everybody hear that? Backstop me if I make a mistake.” Sessions and the Russian-speaking chief nodded.

Jeffrey studied the tactical plot.
Challenger
would reach the prearranged rendezvous point with
Carter,
from the old mission plan, only a few minutes before the Akula-IIs got within extreme torpedo range. They were all still over the shallow continental shelf, giving little room to maneuver or use fancy tactics. He had to work out a whole new doctrine for his strike group and convey it to Harley, all in a very short span of time.

“Sirs,” Meltzer asked from by the navigating table, “may I offer a suggestion?”

“Go ahead, Nav,” Bell said.

“Use one of the vertical wide-screen displays set up as a split screen.”

“Nav?” Jeffrey didn’t get it.

“Two tactical plots, sir. One labeled from the point of view of your combined task force with the Russians. The other from the point of view of the
Challenger
-
Carter
strike group. It’ll help you keep things straight and manage two sets of strategies if you have the proper visual aides.”

“Good thinking, Executive Assistant. The same four ships, except that on one display three are friendly and one is hostile, a German Amethyste-Two, and on the other two are friendly, us and
Carter,
while two are hostile, the Russians.”

“That’s what I meant, Commodore,” Meltzer said.

“Okay,” Jeffrey responded. “Captain, I need Lieutenant Meltzer’s help full time for the duration.”

“Of course, sir,” Bell said.

“Let your assistant navigator take over here,” Jeffrey told Meltzer. “You and I need to bone up ASAP on Akula-Two and Amethyste-Two strengths and weaknesses and their relevant antisubmarine weapons. We need some way to keep
Carter
alive for a thousand miles as she pretends to be an ex-French sub with half
Carter
’s real capabilities, while two Russky skippers do their very best to try to destroy her. Let’s use my office. . . . Captain Bell, have a messenger get me when we’re five minutes out from effective acoustic-link range to Harley.”

Jeffrey and Meltzer headed aft. Jeffrey stopped in his tracks. “Weps!”

“Commodore?”

“Get that Russian minefield overlay overlaid on both sides of the split screen.”

One of Torelli’s technicians typed keys, and more icons appeared on the display that showed two tactical plots.

This is gonna give me schizophrenia before we’re done.

“Captain!”

“Sir?”

“What’s in the tubes?”

“Four high-explosive ADCAPs, two high-explosive Mark Eighty-eights, and our two remaining Mark Three decoys.”

“Perfect, for the moment.” With the Russian sensor and minefield maps,
Challenger
didn’t need to send out off-board probes. “Get the outer doors open on all tubes,
now,
while we’re noisy. Prepare two ADCAPs for immediate firing at
Carter.
”

“Armed, Commodore?”

“Armed.”

Several hours later, Jeffrey had updated Harley and given him orders to head east toward the hulk of the real Amethyste, continuing to emit the proper false acoustic signature. After warning Harley of what he was about to do, Jeffrey ordered Bell to fire a pair of live ADCAPs at
Carter,
programmed and wire-guided to barely miss. This would establish
Challenger
’s credibility to the Russians, while creating a sonar disruption that would help Harley begin to evade.

Bell gave orders, firing ADCAPs. The near-misses made very satisfying, ear-splitting roars. Shattered bits of pack ice, thrown high into the air, pattered down for minutes afterward.
Carter
vanished through this impenetrable acoustic wall.

Jeffrey established contact with the two Russian captains, and worked out a scheme to pursue the Amethyste into a trap in the Canada Basin, meanwhile wearing the German skipper down. He told them not to open fire at all unless he gave them orders, so as not to foul a shot from
Challenger
with her superior capabilities.
Wild Boar
and
Cheetah
could dive below two thousand feet, almost twice an Amethyste’s crush depth, but not nearly as good as
Challenger
’s. Akula-IIs were very quiet, the best fast-attacks Russia had, quieter than a real Amethyste, but noisier than the real
Carter.

And aside from being nearly immune to incoming high-explosive fire, the Akula-IIs were very heavily armed by Western standards. They had ten reloadable torpedo tubes forward, plus six more external single-shot tubes that were loaded at a pier. Their torpedo rooms could each hold forty weapons. The Akulas’ captains told Jeffrey via the link that they each carried twenty-five of the UGST torpedoes with new under-ice gravimeter homing sensors. All ten reloadable tubes were configured to fire these weapons. In a melee, the Akula-IIs could achieve an overwhelming rate of fire. Their weak spot was their sonars. Even the Russians admitted they were a fraction as sensitive as the ones on American subs. In the pursuit of the Amethyste, the Akulas would serve as Jeffrey’s arsenal ships.

Jeffrey and Meltzer figured out, fast, that the key to
Carter
’s survival was convincing the Russians to keep their distance from her in her guise as the German. The reasoning Jeffrey gave
Wild Boar
and
Cheetah,
with the digital link working in effect as a three-way chat room, was twofold. If the Amethyste felt too cornered too soon—and considering what her commandos had already done at Srednekolymsk—her captain would likely go nuclear, even near land. If so, wide separation was needed to be able to take adequate countermeasures. Otherwise, even though the Amethyste had only four torpedo tubes and fourteen torpedoes maximum, Jeffrey’s combined task force could suffer serious losses. The flip side was that, because the twenty-kiloton yields on the Russians’ own nukes were so large—U.S. nuclear torpedoes used yields of a single kiloton or less—the Akulas had to stay well back or they’d be severely damaged or sunk by their own exploding fission weapons.

Wild Boar
’s and
Cheetah
’s captains, men seen only as disembodied responses in typed text on the chat, agreed with Jeffrey that, at least for the first stage of the pursuit, they’d all stay about fifteen nautical miles away from the German, half of maximum range for their UGST torpedoes. Plus, an Amethyste’s F 17 Mod 2 torpedoes had a range of just under fifteen miles. Secretly, Jeffrey knew, for Harley’s sake this was comfortably within the reach of the better American acoustic-link system.

The arrangement made even more sense from Jeffrey’s conflicted point of view because the need to keep within Russian acoustic-link range for constant coordination—and yet maintain that adequate separation from the German—precluded a pincer movement to surround the Amethyste using the higher speeds of the three-ship task force. The Akulas and
Challenger
would have to spread too far apart to form the pincers, losing touch and leaving big holes in their formation that the German could easily slip through. Agreement on this was essential to the specific battle scheme vaguely forming inside Jeffrey’s head. He held his breath. The Russian captains’ replies soon appeared as Cyrillic text on the Ru-ling’s console screen: they both concurred.

Jeffrey had contrived things so the battle would stay as a stern chase, proceeding along at the Amethyste’s flank speed of twenty-five knots, and the Russians would be dependent on
Challenger
for meaningful target tracking data.